A skill is everything that a person can apply to carry out a task. Hence, this definition includes:

– personal traits (e.g. empathy, motivation, hands-on mentality, reliability)
– social skills (e.g. communication, leadership, customer affinity)
– knowledge (e.g. experience, industry and domain know-how, tools & applications, hardware components)
– methods (e.g. Scrum, DevOps, offer process, programming languages, testing methods, medical treatments)
– education degrees
– language skills
– …and even hobbies, interests

The job titles in this report are not based on national or international publicly available occupational classifications, but are derived from a globally collected and standardized data pool. The job classification used consists of over 20,000 different job titles derived from over 35 million standardized data points. The library is constantly updated with market data to reflect the highly dynamic nature of today’s labor markets and job requirements. The hierarchical structure of the library allows for more comprehensive analyses at different levels of detail to best meet the needs of all stakeholders of this report.

2020 was a turbulent and unpredictable year – also for labor markets and talent demands. Since this report focuses on long-term trends rather than short-term variances or so called ‘COVID-effects’, it was editorially decided to only compare data from 2018 and 2019.